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Medicine Science

NY Judge Rules Research Chimps Are Not 'Legal Persons' 172

Posted by timothy from the but-if-they-could-vote dept.
sciencehabit writes: A state judge in New York has dealt the latest blow to an animal rights group's attempt to have chimpanzees declared 'legal persons.' In a decision handed down this morning, New York Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe ruled that two research chimps at Stony Brook University are not covered by a writ of habeas corpus, which typically allows human prisoners to challenge their detention. The Nonhuman Rights Project, which brought the lawsuit in an attempt to free the primates, has vowed to appeal. We posted news last year about an earlier case (mentioned in the article) brought by the same group, which also ended in defeat.
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NY Judge Rules Research Chimps Are Not 'Legal Persons' More

NY Judge Rules Research Chimps Are Not 'Legal Persons'

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  • There goes a few Democrat votes.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by pecosdave ( 536896 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @06:47PM (#50218841) Homepage Journal

    unless they're standing in the same line as the dead people at the polls.

  • If they are not legal persons, that makes them illegal persons. Right?

  • Marriage Partner (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wasteoid ( 1897370 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @07:03PM (#50218925)
    If they had been declared legal persons, you know someone would've tried to marry one.
    • Well, getting screwed by corporations is pretty common; but I've never heard of anyone trying to marry one just because of its personhood...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by msauve ( 701917 )
        If I marry one, do I get half the assets? Apple is pretty cute.
        • No, I'm pretty sure that corporate marriage is the old-school kind, where you get legally subsumed under the principle of coverture and become a wholly owned subsidiary

  • If not research chimps... (Score:3)

    by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @07:03PM (#50218927) Homepage Journal

    what about politician chimps?

  • Next would have been ruling separate but equal unconstitutional and the next thing you know after someone gets their ass and face chewed off some cop offs an unarmed chimp Detroit goes up in flames.

  • This creates a Constitutional crisis. After all, it won't be easy to replace three whole branches of government. But at least their evil plans to force all cable and broadcast networks to air The Banana Channel, all day, every day won't come to fruition.

  • Easy Fix (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Incorporate!

  • Sorry to hear that, Timothy and crew. I assume if chimps didn't make the cut, there's no hope at all for /. editors.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Not really. The judge simply ruled she was bound by precedent that her court did not have sufficient authority to overturn. That's actually a good call, but it has nothing to do with the issue or arguments.

      In any case appeals to "common sense" aren't worth squat when that common sense is based on ignorance or inexperience. It's common sense to talk about "the dark side of the Moon" or to think that the next flip of a coin is affected by prior flips.

      For 80% of the existence of our species we coexisted with

      • If I see a coin come up heads nine out of ten times, I'm expecting it to come up heads on the eleventh toss. That's strong evidence that it isn't a fair coin or toss or something.

        As far as humanity is concerned, we're in a situation where no other species is close to Homo Sapiens in some very important ways, so it's easy to have a bright legal line excluding chimps and other species. Exactly what we're going to do if we encounter intelligent aliens is a matter for speculation.

      • Do we recognize the rights of others as a kind of tribal convention?

        Yes.

        Or are we compelled to do so because of something in human nature?

        Yes.

        There is no OR. That's a false dichotomy.
        We ARE forced to be tribal and social by our biology, we don't get to choose or juxtapose one to the other.
        Our biology requires both living in packs and care for infants - those who don't want that get written out of the DNA-pool hundreds of millions of years ago, long before the whole bipedal thing, let alone ethics.
        And when such an individual appears through chance or mutation - we don't like those animals.
        We call them psychos. Parasites. Evil. Werewolves.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hey! ( 33014 )

          No it is not. A question.

          Legal personhood can not be based on ethics.
          If it were, a society could "legally" give kids and comatose people all the rights that a sane adult has.

          This is certainly not the case.

  • Winning in the opposite direction (Score:3)

    by Loki_1929 ( 550940 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @07:18PM (#50219017) Journal

    These guys are weaving a judicial tapestry that ensures that even if society as a whole were to move a bit in their direction over time, there will be so much precedent against them that it'll take decades longer to accomplish their goals.

  • Humans have a right to life. If I see someone getting attacked on the street by a human predator I have the right to act in defense of the person being attacked up to and including killing the attacker. If we give animals the same rights then logically anyone can act in defense of prey animals by killing predatory animals. This would lead to ecological disaster. Also the logical conclusion would be that the dentist that killed that lion would be a hero for all of the prey animal lives he saved.

    • Re:Why animals can't be given human rights. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @07:31PM (#50219109) Journal

      The issue is significantly more nuanced than that. Most people, and certainly most biologists and behavioral experts agree that there are certain animals that demonstrate sentience in a fashion at least analogous to the way humans think and feel. The great apes, and chimps, in particular, are among that rather rare group who share a significant number of emotional and cognitive traits with humans (little wonder, we're only separated by a few million years of evolution). So the idea here, so far as I understand it, is that those similarities are significant enough that chimps should enjoy, if not human rights, then at least some rights elevated from other far less human animals.

      I tend to weigh on the side that sentient animals should receive protections similar to the protections we give to children or to adults deemed legally incompetent. That means they can't exercise many of the rights that we recognize adult humans have, but neither can they be wantonly exploited, physically or psychologically harmed.

      But to pursue this in the courts is ludicrous. Personhood is fairly well defined in most, if not all, jurisdictions and it pretty much explicitly excludes anyone who isn't a member of H. sapiens. This is going to need to be something that is dealt with at the legislative level, and it's going to be a long fight.

      • It isn't ludicrous at all, for the exact reasons you explain at the start. It is simply guaranteed to fail. But asking and being told no, that is part of the process.

        I personally hope that people keep asking.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by arth1 ( 260657 )

        Personhood is fairly well defined in most, if not all, jurisdictions and it pretty much explicitly excludes anyone who isn't a member of H. sapiens.

        The problem is that there's no definition for what is a member of Homo Sapiens. Was your mother? Her mother? Her mother? When exactly did that change? Back when you and the chimp has the same great-great-N-greatgrandmother?

        I have around 5% Neanderthal genes. Yet chimpanzees are 98% similar to humans. Who's the human?

        Sure, we can come up with a definition of human. But how do we make it so it includes people with an extra chromosome, people who due to genetic differences cannot reproduce with othe

        • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          from looking at some of the citations, number 6 and 7 in particular, it appears as if you really need to take into consideration how they're counting.

          the 1.5 percent figure comes from lining up similar sequences and counting the number of base substitutions but not the segments in between.

          "However,
          as the chimpanzee consortium noted,
          the figure reflects only base substitutions,
          not the many stretches of DNA that have
          been inserted or deleted in the genomes.
          The chimp consortium c

        • There's an easy definition to Homo Sapiens: a child of a Homo Sapiens. This works for all possible people throughout human history. Since we can't travel back in time, that works just fine. Since we haven't developed a population that is viable breeding with itself but can't breed with other people, we don't need to worry about speciation for now.

          There are potential problems with this definition that may come up in the future (massive genetic engineering, contact with aliens, etc.), but they aren't a

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        I tend to weigh on the side that sentient animals should receive protections similar to the protections we give to children or to adults deemed legally incompetent. That means they can't exercise many of the rights that we recognize adult humans have, but neither can they be wantonly exploited, physically or psychologically harmed.

        There are already animal cruelty laws that could be amended to grant better protection from human-on-animal neglect and abuse. The problem with giving them rights is that they'd apply to animal-on-animal action or environmental harm. You wouldn't let a child assault another child, would you? But it would be crazy if we were equally compelled to intervene if a gorilla assaults another gorilla. And we wouldn't let kids hunger or thirst or freeze to death, yet that happens to animals in nature all the time. No

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        But to pursue this in the courts is ludicrous. Personhood is fairly well defined in most, if not all, jurisdictions and it pretty much explicitly excludes anyone who isn't a member of H. sapiens.

        Their goal was to get these animals one of the legal protections afforded to humans, so the argument wasn't that they were people exactly. They were arguing that they should get some of the legal protections afford to persons, specifically the ones that prevent them being used for medical experiments without consent.

        It's a subtle distinction, but as you pointed out in your own post most experts do agree that some animals experience emotions and suffering in a similar way to people. If the emotions and suffe

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nytes ( 231372 )

      On the other hand, mouse traps would be designated as deadly weapons and subject to registration and arms import/export controls.

      And don't get started on what would happen to anyone using rat poison.

    • When I was in Tanzania, I met a guy (a hired security guard for a school) who'd killed a lion a few days earlier. Lions eat people for real there. The wild and all. Something like 50-100 deaths per year.`

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by marciot ( 598356 )

      Humans have a right to life.

      Do we? I'ld say its not a right, it's just a social contract. You can get into a lot of logical absurdities if you assume humans have a right to life, rather than simply accepting that we CHOOSE not to kill one another, because, frankly, being killed is a major drag.

      • What exactly do you think "rights" are but a form of social contract?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by marciot ( 598356 )

          What exactly do you think "rights" are but a form of social contract?

          That's not the exclusive meaning of "right". Here is the dictionary definition:

          "a moral or legal entitlement to have or obtain something or to act in a certain way"

          The part about "legal entitlement" does indeed fit the definition of a social contract, which is all fine and good, but the definition involving "moral" allows people to get away with all sort of logical absurdities.

          So, I think my original objection to the phrase "right to life" still stands.

    • "Also the logical conclusion would be that the dentist that killed that lion would be a hero for all of the prey animal lives he saved" - no, he would have been killed as a predatory animal. But the predatory animals (except humans) predate to eat not for mindless sport (i use the term "sport" very very loosely as its not a fair fight)

  • How could this even get this far? (Score:3)

    by GerryGilmore ( 663905 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @07:31PM (#50219103)
    Listen, I'm what I consider to be a pretty good, card-carrying tree-hugger who is also an omnivore, and I have supported racial, sexual and marriage equality for as long as I can remember. However, when we talk about human rights, they are *Human(TM)* Rights. This is not to say, of course, that we should not treat all sentient beings with as much Humanity(TM) as we can - and that's always a shifting goalpost - but no animal is a human except us human animals. Crikey, PETA-types!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      Don't worry, your human rights are safe, because this is about person rights, not human rights.

  • corporation! That way, they get their legal personhood at the same time....

  • ... after all, think of the chimp's longing for love, waking up to an empty pillow every day? We can't let the fact that he's not actually a human stand in the way.

  • Can someone explain to me why none of the great apes that supposedly share so much with humans in terms of cognitive ability can be taught how to read and to write, not merely as a parlor trick that the creature utilizes so that it will receive some reward that might satisfy an immediate physiological craving such as hunger, but as a technique that the animal might use to communicate its own thoughts and ideas to others (can an ape write a creative story with a beginning, middle, and end, for example?), and in particular, be able to teach this ability to successive generations of apes who may then even surpass the ability of their own instructor? An ape that could read could then teach itself how to do many more things than what it currently knows simply by reading about them, rather than having to be explicitly instructed by someone else... it could learn the rules to a game like chess, for example.

    Practically any human being can typically be taught how to read and to write by the time they are six or seven if the education is available to them. Can somebody tell me what, if anything, is so unique about the human mind that no other creature on the planet can be taught this?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The parts of their brains that handle communication are simply not advanced enough to handle writing, or speech for that matter. That's not really a criteria for personhood though, as for example humans with learning disabilities or severely impaired senses may not be able to write or be creative in the way you describe, but are still considered legal persons.

      The only reason why there was a legal attempt to have them declared legal persons was to get them greater rights, because existing animal rights laws

      • There's also a gradation. I am a more or less fully functioning human, and I have certain legal rights, including the right to make binding contracts and the right to live where I want (with the usual caveats that I have to make the arrangements). A child has the same right to life as I do, but cannot make binding contracts and can be required to live with his or her parents. A human with serious cognitive problems might well have only the same rights as a child.

        It wouldn't be unreasonable to select c

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dj245 ( 732906 )

      Can someone explain to me why none of the great apes that supposedly share so much with humans in terms of cognitive ability can be taught how to read and to write, not merely as a parlor trick that the creature utilizes so that it will receive some reward that might satisfy an immediate physiological craving such as hunger, but as a technique that the animal might use to communicate its own thoughts and ideas to others (can an ape write a creative story with a beginning, middle, and end, for example?), and in particular, be able to teach this ability to successive generations of apes who may then even surpass the ability of their own instructor? An ape that could read could then teach itself how to do many more things than what it currently knows simply by reading about them, rather than having to be explicitly instructed by someone else... it could learn the rules to a game like chess, for example.

      Language is not the only indicator of intelligence. Fu Manchu [time.com] (the chimp, not the movie character) not only figured out how to use a tool to pick a lock and escape from his exhibit, but also was intelligent enough to realize that he needed to keep his escape tool concealed from humans. In other words, he intentionally and deliberately deceived them. Nobody intentionally taught him to do that. Some animals do practice deception, but not usually in regards to unnatural (manmade) constructs like locks and

      • small point, it's a latch.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )

        Children are incapable of deception until they are about 3 years old.

        That assertion is incorrect, as another commenter has posted. Although anecdotal, my youngest grandaughter is not even 2 and has been recently caught a couple of times trying to manipulate her mom or dad into giving her attention at a moment's notice by sometimes pretending to be hurt when she was not. Being only a year and a half old, she's not particularly adept at such deception (so bad at it. in fact, that it's almost funny), but it'

    • We have brain circuitry that facilitates that ability. They do not.
      Broca's area, when damaged, makes one talk very similar to how an Ape who has been taught sign language does.
      Wernicke's area, when damaged, while Broca's area is not, renders someone who can speak fluently and without labor... but makes no sense in the words they are using.

      The apes seem to have at least a somewhat evolved Wenicke's area, but absolutely no Broca's area.

      The important factor here- is even a person, with both of those area
  • Wait. Something's wrong. Earlier I saw the headline "Alabama Governor Appoints Christian Fundamentalist (Who Disavows Public Schools) to State Board of Education", and now chimps aren't people? How come they get to run our government?

  • Chimps everywhere rejoice that as a non-person they do not have to file federal income taxes on their daily banana allowance.

  • two research chimps at Stony Brook University

    http://www.chimpcare.org/asset... [chimpcare.org]

  • All we have to do is pass laws declaring that chimpanzees are corporations, then all will be well.

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